Words

Words of 9/11 Go From Coffee Shops to the Dictionaries

By JANNY SCOTT

Published: February 24, 2002

Every catastrophe begets its own linguistic fallout &#0151; words and phrases forged by the awful novelty of the moment or catapulted from obscurity into everyday speech. Sept. 11 is no exception: its neologistic progeny have infiltrated the language of public discourse and private conversation. And now, in a few cases, they are headed into the dictionary.

When the American Dialect Society, a group of scholars who study American English, recently held its annual voting on the top new, or newly reconditioned, words of the previous year, 9/11 was voted the expression most likely to last. The nominees in various categories included weaponize, ground zero, theoterrorism, daisy cutter, facial profiling and debris surge, among quite a few others.

At Houghton Mifflin in Boston, the editors of the American Heritage College Dictionary, Fourth Edition, due out in April, recently went back in after their editorial deadline and added an entry for 9/11. (Alphabetized by the spelling of the first digit, it is to appear between nine days' wonder and ninepin.) They also added burka, Taliban, weaponize and hawala. Madrassah and Wahhabism were already in. "It's so funny," said Steve Kleinedler, a senior editor for the dictionary. "No one asks about chad anymore."

Words enter the language or leap to prominence when there is something new to describe; they stick around if there is some continuing reason to describe it. Many fade quickly, their longevity directly proportional to the longevity of the phenomena they name. Catchiness helps. But some new terms are too clever to last.

"Shoeicide bomber, that's pretty awful," said Allan Metcalf, a professor of English at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., and executive secretary of the American Dialect Society. He was citing a phrase, traced by some to Jay Leno, that the society voted most creative. "It is so in-your-face clever that I think it's probably gone even now."

In the category of most inspirational, the society voted unanimously for the immortal words of Todd Beamer, used to rally passengers against the hijackers on United Airlines Flight 93: "Let's roll." President Bush has adopted the phrase, and a foundation set up in Mr. Beamer's name to help children of Sept. 11 victims is seeking trademark protection of the expression to try to ensure that any profits from its reuse benefit victims' families.

Immediately after Sept. 11, words and expressions began piling up. Wayne Glowka, a professor of English at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville who edits a column on new words for the journal American Speech, was keeping track. Envelopes stuffed with clippings containing candidate words regularly arrive in his mail, sent by correspondents nationwide.

First there was 911 and 9/11, used to signify not just the date, but everything that happened on it and afterward. There were terms like ground zero, evildoers, Al Qaeda and Taliban. Then there was post-Taliban and anti-Taliban and Sept. 10 "as an adjective meaning oblivious to danger or na&#0239;ve," Professor Glowka said. "I nearly drove off the road when I heard Rush Limbaugh reading an article someone had passed him about the Osamaniacs," he said. The word was being used for women infatuated with Osama bin Laden. The professor said he grabbed a tissue and scribbled Osamaniacs on it. Later, he said, he happened upon a related term, Osamaphiles.

He has also noticed the occasional use of bin added to a name for a kind of all-purpose demonization, not necessarily because the person in question supported Al Qaeda. "When you listen to talk radio, people will call in and say, `I don't like this Johnny bin Walker guy,' " he said, recalling a reference to John Walker Lindh.

In Hyde Park, N.Y., David K. Barnhart, editor and publisher of the Barnhart Dictionary Companion, a quarterly publication of new words, made his own list of 2001 words in preparation for the dialect society's vote. He included anthrax anxiety, Goliath syndrome, religio-terror, shoe bomb, Talibanize and World Trade Center cough.

In January, the society held its annual meeting in San Francisco. In the voting on the word of the year, 9/11 and its variants overwhelmed burka, homeland (as in homeland security), theoterrorism and ground zero. The word or phrase of the year is meant to be the one that best reflects public preoccupations. The winner for 1991, in the Persian Gulf war era, was "mother of all. . . ."

There were other, not entirely scientific, categories. As "most euphemistic," the society chose "daisy cutter," the dainty term for a 15,000- pound United States bomb that explodes just above the ground. It edged out "women of cover," defined by the society as a "Bushism for Muslim women who wear traditional dress."

Lexicographers are obliged to be a little more selective. "Part of our duty is to figure out what has staying power," said Mr. Kleinedler of American Heritage. Weaponize, which had been around before but was under the radar, probably should have been in the dictionary all along, he said. Though most political groups do not get in, he said, the editors made an exception for the Taliban because of the group's impact on American history.

The editors opted not to include 911 as a variant of 9/11 or 9-11 because of concerns that it could be confused with the emergency number and because that style was not common in print. They did not add the new meaning to their entry on ground zero, choosing to wait and see whether the phrase will turn out to merit its own sense, Mr. Kleinedler said.

At the Oxford English Dictionary, Jesse Sheidlower, the principal editor of the North American editorial unit, said weaponization and weaponized were already in the dictionary and they would add weaponize as a verb. "Burka is already in. Theoterrorism we currently don't have the evidence for. Ground zero is probably too specific, though it's a possibility. We have it in the nuclear sense."

(For those who need a refresher on the recent developments in vocabulary, hawala is an informal system of remittance used in much of the Arab world; a madrassah, also spelled madrasa, is an Islamic school; Wahhabism is a strict form of Islam.)

Mr. Sheidlower said he doubted that Sept. 11 and its aftermath would have much lasting effect on the language. Professor Glowka suggested that that remained to be seen. It would depend, he said, on how important it all seemed years from now.

Mr. Barnhart, meanwhile, was off stalking a newer new word. "Incidentally, I did discover some evidence of the term Enronese," he wrote in a letter last week. "It is very skimpy evidence at this point, however. What the appearance of this term reveals is that in the view of some observers, Enron 's collapse has begun to generate enough unique vocabulary to warrant a cover term ending in -ese."